The Strain

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

Setrakian shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable on the bench against the wall inside the precinct house holding tank. He had waited in a glass-walled prebooking area all night, stuck with many of the same thieves, drunks, and perverts he was caged in with now. During the long wait, he had sufficient time to consider the scene he had made outside the coroner’s office, and realized he had spoiled his best chance at reaching the federal disease control agency in the person of Dr. Goodweather.

Of course he had come off like a crazy old man. Maybe he was slipping. Going wobbly like a gyroscope at the end of its revolutions. Maybe the years of waiting for this moment, lived on that line between dread and hope, had taken their toll.

Part of getting old is checking oneself constantly. Keeping a good firm grip on the handrail. Making sure you’re still you.

No. He knew what he knew. The only thing wrong with him now was that he was being driven mad by desperation. Here he was, being held captive in a police station in Midtown Manhattan, while all around him…

Be smart, you old fool. Find a way out of here. You’ve worked your way out of far worse places than this.

He replayed the scene from the booking area in his mind. In the middle of his giving his name and address and having the charges of disturbing the peace and criminal trespass explained to him, and signing a property form for his walking stick (“It is of immense personal significance,” he had told the sergeant) and his heart pills, a Mexican youth of eighteen or nineteen was brought in, wrists handcuffed behind him. The youth had been roughed up, his face scratched, his shirt torn.

What caught Setrakian’s eye were the burn holes in his black pants and across his shirt.

“This is bullshit, man!” said the youth, arms pulled tight behind him, leaning back as he was pushed ahead by detectives. “That puto was crazy. Dude was loco, he was naked, running in the streets. Attacking people. He came at us!” The detectives dropped him, hard, into a chair. “You didn’t see him, man. That fucker bled white. He had this fucking… this thing in his mouth! It wasn’t fucking human!”

One of the detectives came over to Setrakian’s booking sergeant’s cubicle, wiping sweat off his face with a paper towel. “Crazy-ass Mex. Two-time juvie loser, just turned eighteen. Killed a man this time, in a fight. Him and a buddy, must have jumped the guy, stripped off his clothes. Tried to roll him right in the middle of Times Square.”

The booking sergeant rolled his eyes and continued pecking at his keyboard. He asked Setrakian another question, but Setrakian didn’t hear him. He barely felt the seat beneath him, or the warped fists his old, broken hands made. Panic nearly overtook him at the thought of facing the un-faceable again. He saw the future. He saw families torn apart, annihilation, an apocalypse of agonies. Darkness reigning over light. Hell on earth.

At that moment Setrakian felt like the oldest man on the planet.

Suddenly, his dark panic was supplanted by an equally dark impulse: revenge. A second chance. The resistance, the fight—the coming war—it had to begin with him.

Strigoi.

The plague had started.

Isolation Ward, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center

JIM KENT, still in his street clothes, lying in the hospital bed, sputtered, “This is ridiculous. I feel fine.”

Eph and Nora stood on either side of the bed. “Let’s just call it a precaution, then,” said Eph.

“Nothing happened. He must have knocked me down as I went through the door. I think I blacked out for a minute. Maybe a low-grade concussion.”

Nora nodded. “It’s just that… you’re one of us, Jim. We want to make sure everything checks out.”

“But—why in isolation?”

“Why not?” Eph forced a smile. “We’re here already. And look—you’ve got an entire wing of the hospital to yourself. Best bargain in New York City.”

Jim’s smile showed that he wasn’t convinced. “All right,” he said finally. “But can I at least have my phone so I can feel like I’m contributing?”

Eph said, “I think we can arrange that. After a few tests.”

“And—please tell Sylvia I’m all right. She’s going to be panicked.”

“Right,” said Eph. “We’ll call her as soon as we get out of here.”

They left shaken, pausing before exiting the isolation unit. Nora said, “We have to tell him.”

“Tell him what?” said Eph, a little too sharply. “We have to find out what we’re dealing with first.”

Outside the unit, a woman with wiry hair pulled back under a wide headband stood up from the plastic chair she had pulled in from the lobby. Jim shared an apartment in the East Eighties with his girlfriend, Sylvia, a horoscope writer for the New York Post. She brought five cats to the relationship, and he brought one finch, making for a very tense household. “Can I go in?” said Sylvia.

“Sorry, Sylvia. Rules of the isolation wing—only medical personnel. But Jim said to tell you that he’s feeling fine.”

Sylvia gripped Eph’s arm. “What do you say?”

Eph said, tactfully, “He looks very healthy. We want to run some tests, just in case.”

“They said he passed out, he was a bit woozy. Why the isolation ward?”

“You know how we work, Sylvia. Rule out all the bad stuff. Go step by step.”

Sylvia looked to Nora for female reassurance.

Nora nodded and said, “We’ll get him back to you as soon as we can.”

Downstairs, in the hospital basement, Eph and Nora found an administrator waiting for them at the door to the morgue. “Dr. Goodweather, this is completely irregular. This door is never to be locked, and the hospital insists on being informed of what is going on—”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Graham,” said Eph, reading her name off her hospital ID, “but this is official CDC business.” He hated pulling rank like a bureaucrat, but occasionally being a government employee had its advantages. He took out the key he had appropriated and unlocked the door, entering with Nora. “Thank you for your cooperation,” he said, locking it again behind him.

The lights came on automatically. Redfern’s body lay underneath a sheet on a steel table. Eph selected a pair of gloves from the box near the light switch and opened up a cart of autopsy instruments.

“Eph,” said Nora, pulling on gloves herself. “We don’t even have a death certificate yet. You can’t just cut him open.”

“We don’t have time for formalities. Not with Jim up there. And besides—I don’t even know how we’re going to explain his death in the first place. Any way you look at it, I murdered this man. My own patient.”

“In self-defense.”

“I know that. You know that. But I certainly don’t have the time to waste explaining that to the police.”

He took the large scalpel and drew it down Redfern’s chest, making the Y incision from the left and right collarbones down on two diagonals to the top of the sternum, then straight down the center line of the trunk, over the abdomen to the pubis bone. He then peeled back the skin and underlying muscles, exposing the rib cage and the abdominal apron. He didn’t have time to perform a full medical autopsy. But he did need to confirm some things that had shown up on Redfern’s incomplete MRI.

He used a soft rubber hose to wash away the white, bloodlike leakage and viewed the major organs beneath the rib cage. The chest cavity was a mess, cluttered with gross black masses fed by spindly feeders, veinlike offshoots attached to the pilot’s shriveled organs.

“Good God,” said Nora.

Eph studied the growths through the ribs. “It’s taken him over. Look at the heart.”

It was misshapen, shrunken. The arterial structure had been altered also, the circulatory system grown more simplified, the arteries themselves covered over with a dark, cancerous blight.

Nora said, “Impossible. We’re only thirty-six hours out from the plane landing.”

Eph flayed Redfern’s neck then, exposing his throat. The new construct was rooted in the midneck, grown out of the vestibular folds. The protuberance that apparently acted as a stinger lay in its retracted state. It connected straight into the trachea, in fact fusing with it, much like a cancerous growth. Eph elected not to anatomize further just yet, hoping instead to remove the muscle or organ or whatever it was in its entirety at a later time, to study it whole and determine its function.

Eph’s phone rang then. He turned so that Nora could pull it from his pocket with her clean gloves. “It’s the chief medical examiner’s office,” she said, reading the display. She answered it for him, and after listening for a few moments, told the caller, “We’ll be right there.”

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan

DIRECTOR BARNES ARRIVED at the OCME at Thirtieth and First at the same time as Eph and Nora. He stepped from his car, unmistakable in his goatee and navy-style uniform. The intersection was jammed with police cars and TV news crews set up outside the turquoise front of the morgue building.

Their credentials got them inside, all the way to Dr. Julius Mirnstein, the chief medical examiner for New York. Mirnstein was bald but for tufts of brown hair on the sides and back of his head, long faced, dour by nature, wearing the requisite white doctor’s coat over gray slacks.

“We think we were broken into overnight—we don’t know.” Dr. Mirnstein looked at an overturned computer monitor and pencils spilled from a cup. “We can’t get any of the overnight staff on the phone.” He double-checked that with an assistant who had a telephone to her ear, and who shook her head in confirmation. “Follow me.”

Down in the basement morgue, everything appeared to be in order, from the clean autopsy tables to the countertops, scales, and measuring devices. No vandalism here. Dr. Mirnstein led the way to the walk-in refrigerator and waited for Eph, Nora, and Director Barnes to join him.

The body cooler was empty. The stretchers were all still there, and a few discarded sheets, as well as some articles of clothing. A handful of dead bodies remained along the left wall. All the airplane casualties were gone.

“Where are they?” said Eph.

“That’s just it,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “We don’t know.”

Director Barnes stared at him for a moment. “Are you telling me that you believe someone broke in here overnight and stole forty-odd corpses?”

“Your guess is as good as mine, Dr. Barnes. I was hoping your people could enlighten me.”

“Well,” said Barnes, “they didn’t just walk away.”

Nora said, “What about Brooklyn? Queens?”

Dr. Mirnstein said, “I have not heard from Queens yet. But Brooklyn is reporting the same thing.”

“The same thing?” said Nora. “The airline passengers’ corpses are gone?”

“Precisely,” said Dr. Mirnstein. “I called you here in the hopes that perhaps your agency had claimed these cadavers without our knowledge.”

Barnes looked at Eph and Nora. They shook their heads.

Barnes said, “Christ. I have to get on the phone with the FAA.”

Eph and Nora caught him before he did, away from Dr. Mirnstein. “We need to talk,” said Eph.

The director looked from face to face. “How is Jim Kent?”

“He looks fine. He says he feels fine.”

“Okay,” said Barnes. “What?”

“He has a perforation wound in his neck, through the throat. The same as we found on the Flight 753 victims.”

Barnes scowled. “How can that be?”

Eph briefed him on Redfern’s escape from imaging and the subsequent attack. He pulled an MRI scan from an oversize X-ray envelope and stuck it up on a wall reader, switching on the backlight. “This is the pilot’s ‘before’ picture.”

The major organs were in view, everything looked sound. “Yes?” said Barnes.

Eph said, “This is the ‘after’ picture.” He put up a scan showing Redfern’s torso clouded with shadows.

Barnes put on his half-glasses. “Tumors?”

Eph said, “It’s—uh—hard to explain, but it is new tissue, feeding off organs that were completely healthy just twenty-four hours ago.”

Director Barnes pulled down his glasses and scowled again. “New tissue? What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I mean this.” Eph went to a third scan, showing the interior of Redfern’s neck. The new growth below the tongue was evident.

“What is it?” asked Barnes.

“A stinger,” answered Nora. “Of some sort. Muscular in construction. Retractable, fleshy.”

Barnes looked at her as if she was crazy. “A stinger?”

“Yes, sir,” said Eph, quick to back her up. “We believe it’s responsible for the cut in Jim’s neck.”

Barnes looked back and forth between them. “You’re telling me that one of the survivors of the airplane catastrophe grew a stinger and attacked Jim Kent with it?”

Eph nodded and referred to the scans again as proof. “Everett, we need to quarantine the remaining survivors.”

Barnes checked Nora, who nodded rigorously, with Eph on this all the way.

Director Barnes said, “The inference is that you believe this… this tumorous growth, this biological transformation… is somehow transmissible?”

“That is our supposition and our fear,” said Eph. “Jim may well be infected. We need to determine the progression of this syndrome, whatever it is, if we want to have any chance at all of arresting it and curing him.”

“Are you telling me you saw this… this retractable stinger, as you call it?”

“We both did.”

“And where is Captain Redfern now?”

“At the hospital.”

“His prognosis?”

Eph answered before Nora could. “Uncertain.”

Barnes looked at Eph, now starting to sense that something wasn’t kosher.

Eph said, “All we are requesting is an order to compel the others to receive medical treatment—”

“Quarantining three people means potentially panicking three hundred million others.” Barnes checked their faces again, as though for final confirmation. “Do you think this relates in any way to the disappearance of these bodies?”

“I don’t know,” said Eph. What he almost said was, I don’t want to know.

“Fine,” said Barnes. “I will start the process.”

“Start the process?”

“This will take some doing.”

Eph said, “We need this now. Right now.”

“Ephraim, what you have presented me with here is bizarre and unsettling, but it is apparently isolated. I know you are concerned for the health of a colleague, but securing a federal order of quarantine means that I have to request and receive an executive order from the president, and I don’t carry those around in my wallet. I don’t see any indication of a potential pandemic just yet, and so I must go through normal channels. Until that time, I do not want you harassing these other survivors.”

“Harassing?” said Eph.

“There will be enough panic without our overstepping our obligations. I might point out to you, if the other survivors have indeed become ill, why haven’t we heard from them by now?”

Eph had no answer.

“I will be in touch.”

Barnes went off to make his calls.

Nora looked at Eph. She said, “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” She could see right through him.

“Don’t go looking up the other survivors. Don’t screw up our chance of saving Jim by pissing off this lawyer woman or scaring off the others.”

Eph was stewing when the outside doors opened. Two EMTs wheeled in an ambulance gurney with a body bag set on top, met by two morgue attendants. The dead wouldn’t wait for this mystery to play itself out. They would just keep coming. Eph foresaw what would happen to New York City in the grip of a true plague. Once the municipal resources were overwhelmed—police, fire, sanitation, morticians—the entire island, within weeks, would degenerate into a stinking pile of compost.

A morgue attendant unzipped the bag halfway—and then emitted an uncharacteristic gasp. He backed away from the table with his gloved hands dripping white, the opalescent fluid oozing from the black rubber bag, down the side of the stretcher, onto the floor.

“What the hell is this?” the attendant asked the EMTs, who stood by the doorway looking particularly disgusted.

“Traffic fatality,” said one, “following a fight. I don’t know… must have been a milk truck or something.”

Eph pulled gloves from the box on the counter and approached the bag, peering inside. “Where’s the head?”

“In there,” said the other EMT. “Somewhere.”

Eph saw that the corpse had been decapitated at the shoulders, the remaining mass of its neck splattered with gobs of white.

“And the guy was naked,” added the EMT. “Quite a night.”

Eph drew the zipper all the way down to the bottom seam. The headless corpse was overweight, male, roughly fifty. Then Eph noticed its feet.

He saw a wire wound around the bare big toe. As though there had been a casualty tag attached.

Nora saw the toe wire also, and blanched.

“A fight, you say?” said Eph.

“That’s what they told us,” said the EMT, opening the door to the outside. “Good day to you, and good luck.”

Eph zipped up the bag. He didn’t want anyone else seeing the tag wire. He didn’t want anyone asking him questions he couldn’t answer.

He turned to Nora. “The old man.”

Nora nodded. “He wanted us to destroy the corpses,” she remembered.

“He knew about the UV light.” Eph stripped off his latex gloves, thinking again of Jim, lying alone in isolation—with who could say what growing inside him. “We have to find out what else he knows.”

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

SETRAKIAN COUNTED thirteen other men inside the room-size cage with him, including one troubled soul with fresh scratches on his neck, squatting in the corner and rubbing spit vigorously into his hands.

Setrakian had seen worse than this, of course—much worse. On another continent, in another century, he had been imprisoned as a Romanian Jew in World War II, in the extermination camp known as Treblinka. He was nineteen when the camp was brought down in 1943, still a boy. Had he entered the camp at the age he was now, he would not have lasted a few days—perhaps not even the train ride there.

Setrakian looked at the Mexican youth on the bench next to him, the one he had first seen in booking, who was now roughly the same age Setrakian had been when the war ended. His cheek was an angry blue and dried black blood clogged the slice beneath his eye. But he appeared to be uninfected.

Setrakian was more concerned about the youth’s friend, lying on the bench next to him, curled up on his side, not moving.

For his part, Gus, feeling angry and sore, and jittery now that his adrenaline was gone, grew wary of the old man looking over at him. “Got a problem?”

Others in the tank perked up, drawn by the prospect of a fight between a Mexican gangbanger and an aged Jew.

Setrakian said to him, “I have a very great problem indeed.”

Gus looked at him darkly. “Don’t we all, then.”

Setrakian felt the others turning away, now that there would be no sport to interrupt their tedium. Setrakian took a closer look at the Mexican’s curled-up friend. His arm lay over his face and neck, his knees were pulled up tight, almost into a fetal position.

Gus was looking over at Setrakian, recognizing him now. “I know you.”

Setrakian nodded, used to this, saying, “118th Street.”

“Knickerbocker Loan. Yeah—shit. You beat my brother’s ass one time.”

“He stole?”

“Tried to. A gold chain. He’s a druggie shitbag now, nothing but a ghost. But back then, he was tough. Few years older than me.”

“He should have known better.”

“He did know better. Why he tried it. That gold chain was just a trophy, really. He wanted to defy the street. Everybody warned him, ‘You don’t fuck with the pawnbroker.’”

Setrakian said, “The first week I took over the shop, someone broke my front window. I replaced it—and then I watch, and I wait. Caught the next bunch who came to break it. I gave them something to think about, and something to tell their friends. That was more than thirty years ago. I haven’t had a problem with my glass since.”

Gus looked at the old man’s crumpled fingers, outlined by wool gloves. “Your hands,” he said. “What happened, you get caught stealing once?”

“Not stealing, no,” said the old man, rubbing his hands through the wool. “An old injury. One I did not receive medical attention for until much too late.”

Gus showed him the tattoo on his hand, making a fist so that the webbing between his thumb and forefinger swelled up. It showed three black circles. “Like the design on your shop sign.”

“Three balls is an ancient symbol for a pawnbroker. But yours has a different meaning.”

“Gang sign,” said Gus, sitting back. “Means thief.”

“But you never stole from me.”

“Not that you knew, anyway,” said Gus, smiling.

Setrakian looked at Gus’s pants, the holes burned into the black fabric. “I hear you killed a man.”

Gus’s smile went away.

“You were not wounded? The cut on your face, you received from the police?”

Gus stared at him now, like the old man might be some kind of jailhouse informer. “What’s it to you?”

Setrakian said, “Did you get a look inside his mouth?”

Gus turned to him. The old man was leaning forward, almost in prayer. Gus said, “What do you know about that?”

“I know,” said the old man, without looking up, “that a plague has been loosed upon this city. And soon the world beyond.”

“This wasn’t no plague. This was some crazy psycho with kind of a… a crazy-ass tongue coming up out of his…” Gus felt ridiculous saying this aloud. “So what the fuck was that?”

Setrakian said, “What you fought was a dead man, possessed by a disease.”

Gus remembered the look on the fat man’s face, blank and hungry. His white blood. “What—like a pinche zombie?”

Setrakian said, “Think more along the lines of a man with a black cape. Fangs. Funny accent.” He turned his head so that Gus could hear him better. “Now take away the cape and fangs. The funny accent. Take away anything funny about it.”

Gus hung on the old man’s words. He had to know. His somber voice, his melancholy dread, it was contagious.

“Listen to what I have to say,” the old man continued. “Your friend here. He has been infected. You might say—bitten.”

Gus looked over at unmoving Felix. “No. No, he’s just… the cops, they knocked him out.”

“He is changing. He is in the grip of something beyond your comprehension. A disease that changes human people into non people. This person is no longer your friend. He is turned.”

Gus remembered seeing the fat man on top of Felix, their maniacal embrace, the man’s mouth going at Felix’s neck. And the look on Felix’s face—a look of terror and awe.

“You feel how hot he is? His metabolism, racing. It takes great energy to change—painful, catastrophic changes are taking place inside his body now. The development of a parasitic organ system to accommodate his new state of being. He is metamorphosing into a feeding organism. Soon, twelve to thirty-six hours from the time of infection, but most likely tonight, he will arise. He will thirst. He will stop at nothing to satisfy his craving.”

Gus stared at the old man as though in a state of suspended animation.

Setrakian said, “Do you love your friend?”

Gus said, “What?”

“By ‘love,’ I mean honor, respect. If you love your friend—you will destroy him before he is completely turned.”

Gus’s eyes darkened. “Destroy him?”

“Kill him. Or else he will turn you.”

Gus shook his head in slow motion. “But… if you say he’s already dead… how can I kill him?”

“There are ways,” said Setrakian. “How did you kill the one who attacked you?”

“A knife. That thing coming out of his mouth—I cut up that shit.”

“His throat?”

Gus nodded. “That too. Then a truck hit him, finished the job.”

“Separating the head from the body is the surest way. Sunlight also works—direct sunlight. And there are other, more ancient methods.”

Gus turned to look at Felix. Lying there, not moving. Barely breathing. “Why doesn’t anybody know about this?” he said. He turned back to Setrakian, wondering which one of them was crazy. “Who are you really, old man?”

“Elizalde! Torrez!”

Gus was so absorbed in the conversation that he never saw the cops enter the cell. He looked up at hearing his and Felix’s names and saw four policemen wearing latex gloves come forward, geared up for a struggle. Gus was pulled to his feet before he even knew what was happening.

They tapped Felix’s shoulder, slapped at his knee. When that failed to rouse him, they lifted him up bodily, locking their arms underneath his. His head hung low and his feet dragged as they hauled him away.

“Listen, please.” Setrakian got to his feet behind them. “This man—he is sick. Dangerously ill. He has a communicable disease.”

“Why we wear these gloves, Pops,” called back one cop. They wrenched up Felix’s limp arms as they dragged him through the door. “We deal with STDs all the time.”

Setrakian said, “He must be segregated, do you hear me? Locked up separately.”

“Don’t worry, Pops. We always offer preferential treatment to killers.”

Gus’s eyes stayed on the old man as the tank door was closed and the cops pulled him away.

Stoneheart Group, Manhattan

Here was the bedroom of the great man.

Climate controlled and fully automated, the presets adjustable through a small console just an arm’s reach away. The shushing of the corner humidifiers in concert with the drone of the ionizer and the whispering air-filtration system was like a mother’s reassuring hush. Every man, thought Eldritch Palmer, should slumber nightly in a womb. And sleep like a baby.

Dusk was still many hours away, and he was impatient. Now that everything was in motion—the strain spreading throughout New York City with the sure exponential force of compound interest, doubling and doubling itself again every night—he hummed with the glee of a greedy banker. No financial success, of which there had been plenty, ever enlivened him as much as did this vast endeavor.

His nightstand telephone toned once, the handset flashing. Any calls to this phone had to be routed through his nurse and assistant, Mr. Fitzwilliam, a man of extraordinary good judgment and discretion. “Good afternoon, sir.”

“Who is it, Mr. Fitzwilliam?”

“Mr. Jim Kent, sir. He says it is urgent. I am putting him through.”

In a moment, Mr. Kent, one of Palmer’s many well-placed Stoneheart Society members, said, “Yes, hello?”

“Go ahead, Mr. Kent.”

“Yes—can you hear me? I have to talk quietly…”

“I can hear you, Mr. Kent. We were cut off last time.”

“Yes. The pilot had escaped. Walked away from testing.”

Palmer smiled. “And he is gone now?”

“No. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I followed him through the hospital until Dr. Goodweather and Dr. Martinez caught up with him. They said Redfern is okay, but I can’t confirm his status. I heard another nurse saying I was alone up here. And that members of the Canary project had taken over a locked room in the basement.”

Palmer darkened. “You are alone up where?”

“In this isolation ward. Just a precaution. Redfern must have hit me or something, he knocked me out.”

Palmer was silent for a moment. “I see.”

“If you would explain to me exactly what I am supposed to be looking for, I could assist you better—”

“You said they have commandeered a room in the hospital?”

“In the basement. It might be the morgue. I will find out more later.”

Palmer said, “How?”

“Once I get out of here. They just need to run some tests on me.”

Palmer reminded himself that Jim Kent was not an epidemiologist himself, but more of a facilitator for the Canary project, with no medical training. “You sound as though you have a sore throat, Mr. Kent.”

“I do. Just a touch of something.”

“Mm-hmm. Good day, Mr. Kent.”

Palmer hung up. Kent’s exposure was merely an aggravation, but the report about the hospital morgue room was troubling. Though in any worthy venture, there are always hurdles to overcome. A lifetime of deal making had taught him that it was the setbacks and pitfalls that make final victory so sweet.

He picked up the handset again and pressed the star button.

“Yes, sir?”

“Mr. Fitzwilliam, we have lost our contact within the Canary project. You will ignore any further calls from his mobile phone.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And we need to dispatch a team to Queens. It seems there may be something in the basement of the Jamaica Hospital Medical Center that needs retrieving.”

Flatbush, Brooklyn

ANN-MARIE BARBOUR checked again to make sure that she had locked all the doors, then went through the house twice—room by room, top to bottom—touching every mirror twice in order to calm herself down. She could not pass any reflective surface without reaching out to it with the first two fingers of her right hand, a nod following each touch, a rhythmic routine resembling genuflection. Then she went through a third time, wiping each surface clean with a fifty-fifty mix of Windex and holy water until she was satisfied.

When she felt in control of herself again, she phoned her sister-in-law, Jeanie, who lived in central New Jersey.

“They’re fine,” said Jeanie, referring to the children, whom she had come and picked up the day before. “Very well behaved. How is Ansel?”

Ann-Marie closed her eyes. Tears leaked out. “I don’t know.”

“Is he better? You gave him the chicken soup I brought?”

Ann-Marie was afraid her trembling lower jaw would be detected in her speech. “I will. I… I’ll call you back.”

She hung up and looked out the back window, at the graves. Two patches of overturned dirt. Thinking of the dogs lying there.

Ansel. What he had done to them.

She scrubbed her hands, then went through the house again, just the downstairs this time. She pulled out the mahogany chest from the buffet in the dining room and opened up the good silver, her wedding silver. Shiny and polished. Her secret stash, hidden there as another woman might hide candy or pills. She touched each utensil, her fingertips going back and forth from the silver to her lips. She felt that she would fall apart if she didn’t touch every single one.

Then she went to the back door. She paused there, exhausted, her hand on the knob, praying for guidance, for strength. She prayed for knowledge, to understand what was happening, and to be shown the right thing to do.

She opened the door and walked down the steps to the shed. The shed from which she had dragged the dogs’ corpses to the corner of the yard, not knowing what else to do. Luckily, there had been an old shovel underneath the front porch, so she didn’t have to go back into the shed. She buried them in shallow soil and wept over their graves. Wept for them and for her children and for herself.

She stepped to the side of the shed, where orange and yellow mums were planted in a box beneath a small, four-pane window. She hesitated before looking inside, shading her eyes from the sunlight. Yard tools hung from pegboard walls inside, other tools stacked on shelves, and a small workbench. The sunlight through the window formed a perfect rectangle on the dirt floor, Ann-Marie’s shadow falling over a metal stake driven into the ground. A chain like the one on the door was attached to the stake, the end of which was obscured by her angle of vision. The floor showed signs of digging.

She went back to the front, stopping before the chained doors. Listening.

“Ansel?”

No more than a whisper on her part. She listened again, and, hearing nothing, put her mouth right up to the half inch of space between the rain-warped doors.

“Ansel?”

A rustling. The vaguely animalistic sound terrified her… and yet reassured her at the same time.

He was still inside. Still with her.

“Ansel… I don’t know what to do… please… tell me what to do… I can’t do this without you. I need you, dearest. Please answer me. What will I do?”

More rustling, like dirt being shaken off. A guttural noise, as from a clogged pipe.

If she could just see him. His reassuring face.

Ann-Marie reached inside the front of her blouse, drawing out the stubby key that hung on a shoelace there. She reached for the lock that secured the chain through the door handles and inserted the key, turning it until it clicked, the curved top disengaging from the thick steel base. She unwound the chain and pulled it through the metal handles, letting it fall to the grass.

The doors parted, swinging out a few inches on their own. The sun was straight overhead now, the shed dark inside but for residual light from the small window. She stood before the opening, trying to see inside.

“Ansel?”

She saw a shadow stirring.

“Ansel… you have to keep quieter, at night… Mr. Otish from across the street called the police, thinking it was the dogs… the dogs…”

She grew teary, everything threatening to spill out of her.

“I… I almost told him about you. I don’t know what to do, Ansel. What is the right thing? I am so lost here. Please… I need you…”

She was reaching for the doors when a moanlike cry shocked her. He drove at the shed doors—at her—attacking from within. Only the staked chain jerked him back, strangling an animal roar in his throat. But as the doors burst open, she saw—before her own scream, before she slammed the doors on him like shutters on a ferocious hurricane—her husband crouched in the dirt, naked but for the dog collar tight around his straining neck, his mouth black and open. He had torn away most of his hair just as he had torn off his clothes, his pale, blue-veined body filthy from sleeping—hiding—beneath the dirt like a dead thing that had burrowed into its own grave. He bared his bloodstained teeth, eyes rolling back inside his head, recoiling from the sun. A demon. She wound the chain back through the handles with wildly fluttering hands and fastened the lock, then turned and fled back into her house.

Vestry Street, Tribeca

THE LIMOUSINE took Gabriel Bolivar straight to his personal physician’s office in a building with an underground garage. Dr. Ronald Box was the primary physician for many New York-based celebrities of film, television, and music. He was not a Rock Doc, or a Dr. Feelgood, a pure prescription-writing machine—although he was liberal with his electronic pen. He was a trained internist, and well versed in drug-rehabilitation centers, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, hepatitis C, and other fame-related maladies.

Bolivar went up the elevator in a wheelchair, clad only in a black robe, sunk into himself like an old man. His long, silken black hair had gone dry and was falling out in patches. He covered his face with thin, arthriticlike hands so that none would recognize him. His throat was so swollen and raw that he could barely speak.

Dr. Box saw him right away. He was looking through images transferred electronically from the clinic. The images came with a note of apology from the head clinician, who saw only the results and not the patient, promising to repair their machines and suggesting another round of tests in a day or two. But, looking at Bolivar, Dr. Box didn’t think it was their equipment that was corrupt. He went over Bolivar with his stethoscope, listening to his heart, asking him to breathe. He tried to look into Bolivar’s throat, but the patient declined, wordlessly, his black-red eyes glaring in pain.

“How long have you had those contact lenses in?” asked Dr. Box.

Bolivar’s mouth curled into a jagged snarl and he shook his head.

Dr. Box looked at the linebacker standing by the door, wearing a driver’s uniform. Bolivar’s bodyguard, Elijah—six foot six, two hundred and sixty pounds—looked very nervous, and Dr. Box was becoming frightened. He examined the rock star’s hands, which appeared aged and sore yet not at all fragile. He tried to check the lymph nodes under his jaw, but the pain was too great. The temperature reading from the clinic had read 123° F, a human impossibility, and yet, standing near enough to feel the heat coming off Bolivar, Dr. Box believed it.

Dr. Box stood back.

“I don’t really know how to tell you this, Gabriel. Your body, it seems, is riddled with malignant neoplasms. That’s cancer. I’m seeing carcinoma, sarcoma, and lymphoma, and all of it is wildly metastasized. There is no medical precedent for this that I am aware of, although I will insist on involving some experts in the field.”

Bolivar just sat there, listening, a baleful look in his discolored eyes.

“I don’t know what it is, but something has you in its grip. I do mean that literally. As far as I can tell, your heart has ceased beating on its own. It appears that the cancer is… manipulating the organ now. Beating it for you. Your lungs, the same. They are being invaded and… almost absorbed, transformed. As though…” Dr. Box was just realizing this now. “As though you are in the midst of a metamorphosis. Clinically, you could be considered deceased. It appears that the cancer is keeping you alive. I don’t know what else to say to you. Your organs are all failing, but your cancer… well, your cancer is doing great.”

Bolivar sat staring into the middle distance with those frightful eyes. His neck bucked slightly, as though he were trying to formulate speech but could not get his voice past an obstruction.

Dr. Box said, “I want to check you in to Sloan-Kettering right away. We can do so under an assumed name with a dummy social security number. It’s the top cancer hospital in the country. I want Mr. Elijah to drive you there now—”

Bolivar emitted a rumbling chest groan that was an unmistakable no. He placed his hands on the armrests of the wheelchair and Elijah came forward to brace the rear handles as Bolivar rose to his feet. He took a moment regaining his balance, then picked at the belt of his robe with his sore hands, the knot falling open.

Revealed beneath his robe was his limp penis, blackened and shriveled, ready to drop from his groin like a diseased fig from a dying tree.

Bronxville

NEEVA, THE LUSSES’ NANNY, still very much rattled by the events of the past twenty-four hours, left the children in the care of her nephew, Emile, while her daughter, Sebastiane, drove her back to Bronxville. She had kept the Luss children, Keene and his eight-year-old sister, Audrey, eating Frosted Flakes for lunch, and cubed fruit, things Neeva had taken with her from the Luss house when she’d fled.

Now she was returning for more. The Luss children wouldn’t eat her Haitian cooking, and—more pressingly—Neeva had forgotten Keene’s Pulmicort, his asthma medication. The boy was wheezing and looking pasty.

They pulled in to find Mrs. Guild’s green car in the Lusses’ driveway, the sight of which gave Neeva pause. She told Sebastiane to wait for her there, then got out and straightened her slip beneath her dress, going with her key to the side entrance. The door opened without any tone, the house alarm not set. Neeva walked through the perfectly appointed mudroom with built-in cubbies and coat hooks and heated tile floor—a mudroom that had never seen any mud—and pushed through the French doors into the kitchen.

It did not appear that anyone had been in the room since she had left with the children. She stood still inside the doorway and listened with extraordinary attention, holding her breath for as long as she could before exhaling. She heard nothing.

“Hallo?” she called a few times, wondering if Mrs. Guild, with whom she had a largely silent relationship—the housekeeper, Neeva suspected, was a silent racist—would answer. Wondering if Joan—a mother so devoid of natural maternal instinct as to be, for all her lawyerly success, like a child herself—would answer. And knowing, in both cases, that they would not.

Hearing nothing, she crossed to the central island and laid her bag gently down on it, between the sink and the countertop range. She opened the snack cabinet, and quickly, a bit more like a thief than she had imagined, filled a Food Emporium bag with crackers and juice pouches and Smartfood popcorn—stopping once in a while to listen.

After raiding the paneled refrigerator of string cheese and yogurt drinks, she noticed Mr. Luss’s number on the contact sheet taped to the wall near the kitchen phone. A bolt of uncertainty shot through her. What could she say to him? Your wife is ill. She is not right. So I take the children. No. As it was, she barely exchanged words with the man. There was something evil in this magnificent house, and her first and only duty—both as an employee and as a mother herself—was the safety of the children.

She checked the cabinet over the built-in wine cooler, but the box of Pulmicort was empty, just as she had dreaded. She had to go down to the basement pantry. At the top of the curling, carpeted stairs, she paused and pulled from her bag her black enameled crucifix. She descended with it at her side just in case. From the bottom step, the basement appeared very dark for that time of day. She flipped up every switch on the panel and stood listening after the lights came on.

They called it the basement, but it was actually another fully appointed floor of their home. They had installed a home theater downstairs, complete with theater chairs and a reproduction popcorn cart. Another subroom was jammed with toys and game tables; another was the laundry where Mrs. Guild kept up with the family’s clothing and linens. There was also a fourth bathroom, the pantry, and a recently installed temperature-controlled wine cellar. It was European in style, the workers having broken through the basement foundation to create a pure dirt floor.

The heat came rumbling on with a sound like that of somebody kicking the furnace—the actual working guts of the basement were hidden behind a door somewhere—and the sound nearly sent Neeva through the ceiling. She turned back to the stairs, but the boy needed his nebulizer medicine, his color wasn’t good.

She crossed the basement determinedly, and was between two leather theater chairs, halfway to the folding door of the pantry, when she noticed the stuff stacked up against the windows. Why it had seemed so dark down there in the middle of the day: toys and old packing cartons were arranged in a tower up the wall, obscuring the small windows, with old clothes and newspapers snuffing out every ray of the day’s sun.

Neeva stared, wondering who had done this. She hurried to the pantry, finding Keene’s asthma medicine stacked on the same steel-wire shelf as Joan’s vitamins and tubs of candy-colored Tums. She pulled down two long boxes of the plastic vials, ignoring the rest of the food in her haste, rushing away without closing the door.

Starting back across the basement, she noticed that the door to the laundry room was ajar. Something about that door, which was never left open, represented the disruption of normal order that Neeva felt so palpably in this house.

She saw rich and dark dirt stains on the plush carpeting then, spaced almost like footprints. Her eye followed them to the wine cellar door she had to pass in order to reach the stairs. She saw soil smeared on the door handle.

Neeva felt it as she neared the wine cellar door. From that earthen room, a tomblike blackness. A soullessness. And yet—not a coldness. Instead, a contradictory warmth. A heat, lurking and seething.

The door handle began to turn as she rushed past it to the stairs. Neeva, a fifty-three-year-old woman with bad knees, her feet as much kicking at the steps as running up them. She stumbled, steadying herself against the wall with her hand, the crucifix gouging out a small chunk of plaster. Something was behind her, coming up the stairs at her. She yelled in Creole as she emerged into the sunlit first floor, running the length of the long kitchen, grabbing her handbag, knocking over the Food Emporium bag, snacks and drinks crashing to the floor, too scared to turn back.

The sight of her mother running screaming from the house in her ankle-length floral dress and black shoes brought Sebastiane out of her car. “No!” yelled her mother, motioning her back inside. She ran as if she was being chased, but in fact there was no one behind her. Sebastiane dropped back into her seat, alarmed.

“Mama, what happened?”

“Drive!” Neeva yelled, her large chest heaving, her eyes still wild, focused on the open side door.

“Mama,” said Sebastiane, putting the car into reverse. “This is kidnapping. They have laws. Did you call the husband? You said you would call the husband.”

Neeva opened her palm, finding it bloody. She had gripped the beaded crucifix so tightly the crosspiece had cut into her flesh. She let it fall to the floor of the car.

17th Precinct Headquarters, East Fifty-first Street, Manhattan

THE OLD PROFESSOR sat at the very end of the bench inside lockup, as far away as possible from a shirtless, snoring man who had just relieved himself without wishing to trouble anyone else for directions to the toilet in the corner of the room, or even removing his pants.

“Setraykeen… Setarkian… Setrainiak…”

“Here,” he answered, rising and walking toward the remedial reader in the police officer’s uniform by the open tank door. The officer let him out and closed the door behind him.

“Am I being released?” asked Setrakian.

“I guess so. Your son’s here to pick you up.”

“My—”

Setrakian held his tongue. He followed the officer to an unmarked interrogation room. The cop pulled open the door and motioned for him to walk inside.

It took Setrakian a few moments, just long enough for the door to close behind him, to recognize the person on the other side of the bare table as Dr. Ephraim Goodweather of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Next to him was the female doctor who had been with him before. Setrakian smiled appreciatively at their ruse, though he was not surprised by their presence.

Setrakian said, “So it has begun.”

Dark circles—like bruises of fatigue and sleeplessness—hung under Dr. Goodweather’s eyes as he looked the old man up and down. “You want out of here, we can get you out. First I need an explanation. I need information.”

“I can answer many of your questions. But we have lost so much time already. We must begin now—this moment—if we have any chance at all of containing this insidious thing.”

“That’s what I’m talking about,” said Dr. Goodweather, thrusting out one hand rather harshly. “What is this insidious thing?”

“The passengers from the plane,” said Setrakian. “The dead have risen.”

Eph did not know how to answer that. He couldn’t say. He wouldn’t say.

“There is much you will need to let go of, Dr. Goodweather,” said Setrakian. “I understand that you believe you are taking a risk in trusting the word of an old stranger. But, in a sense, I am taking a thousandfold greater risk entrusting this responsibility to you. What we are discussing here is nothing less than the fate of the human race—though I don’t expect you to quite believe that yet, or understand it. You think that you are drafting me into your cause. The truth of the matter is, I am drafting you into mine.”